Netherlandish art scholar and director Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Friedländer
was the son of Leopold Friedländer (1832-ca.1880), a Berlin banker, and Helene
Noether (Friedländer) (1843-after 1901). He began studying art history in
1891 in Munich, continuing in Florence (under August Schmarsow, and ultimately Leipzig, writing a
dissertation on Albrecht Altdorfer under Anton Springer. Friedländer
volunteered at the graphics collection (Kupferstichkabinett) of the Berlin State
Museums under Friedrich Lippmann in 1891 and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum
in Cologne between 1895-96 under Ludwig Scheibler. Through Lippmann's
recommendation, he joined the Gemäldegalerie (Paintings Department) of the
Berlin State Museums in 1896 under Wilhelm Bode. He was appointed Deputy
Director (immediately under Bode) in 1904, adding the Kupferstichkabinett
responsibilities of the Museum in 1908. He and Bode were responsible for the
great acquisitions years of the Berlin museums, with Friedländer personally donating a number of
works to the Gemäldegalerie and Kupferstichkabinett. In 1924, Friedländer began publishing his magnum opus, a history of early Netherlandish
painting artist by artist, which, for its detail and documentation, has never been
surpassed. He succeeded Bode as Director in 1924. He and Jakob Rosenberg wrote a monograph on Lucas Cranach in 1932. His retirement age
coincided with the ascension of the Nazi rise in 1933 and the proscriptions
against Jews in federal employment. He left museum,
working as a private expertiser for German and foreign art dealers, enjoying the
protection of Nazi Reichmarshall Hermann Goering (1893-1946) whose art collection he helped advise.
Friedländer emigrated to his spiritual home of Amsterdam in 1939. After the
German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, an erroneous arrest
was reversed through intervention of the Nazi art dealer Karl Haberstock (1878-1956)
who was also working for Goering. Friedländer's book, On Art
and Connoisseurship, appeared first in English in 1942 and in German only
after the war as, Von Kunst und Kennerschaft in 1946. Shortly before his death, his 1916
Von Eyck bis Bruegel was revised and edited by Fritz Grossmann and published in 1956 in English as From Van Eyck to Bruegel, Early Netherlandish Painting.

Though methodologically a
connoisseur-style art historian, Friedländer was a severe critic of the method
of Giovanni Morelli, as was Bode. This may have been as much an
anti-Austrian, anti-academician stance, since Morelli was most highly revered by
the University of Vienna art historian Franz Wickhoff. Friedländer
wrote that "Academicians
enter the museum with ideas, art connoisseurs leave it with ideas." (Ladis).
Vienna school art historians generally were distained by the Berlin museum
directors. Friedländer
retorted to Erwin Panofsky, after seeing the posthumously
titled book Art History as
the History of the Mind (Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte), by
the Vienna school (and van Eyck) scholar, Max Dvořák, that "we [in the museum world] are engaged in the physical art history" (Körpergeschichte).
Friedländer's brand of connoisseurship relied on intuition and vast experience
rather than a Morellian cataloging of stylistic idiosyncrasies of an individual
artist. His realm was the rarified world of the dealer and connoisseur:
he never gave a public lecture (Panofsky). His interests within art,
however, were wide-ranging. A
monograph on the contemporary artist Max Liebermann written by Friedländer included works from Friedländer's own collection. Other
modernist art books by Friedländer included ones on Max Slevogt and the French Impressionists,
of whose styles he, unlike
Bode, approved. Next to Bode, Friedländer was the most
consulted "art expert" in Berlin (Wendland). Many of the most important art historians of the next generation passed through his Print Room as volunteers. These included Jenö Lányi. During the last
part of his life
he was often compared to the other nonagenarian connoisseur art historian,
Bernard Berenson, though the two had little in common. He is not
related to the German-American art historian Walter Friedländer. LS